The purpose of a Meat Puppet is usually to act as a tool for the controller, ranging from basic slaves to intricately placed spies, sometimes also being used as a "Seeing Eye Dog" if the controller can remotely view through the puppet's senses. Generally, a Meat Puppet is a Faceless Goon, used as a Meat Shield, or simply becomes a brainwashed Mook that's expendable to a villain or antihero in control of it.

The following are special types of Meat Puppets chosen for specific purposes:

Big Dumb Body - A meat puppet that holds little intelligence, but is desirable for its physical prowess and durability.

Living Bodysuit - when a host is chosen as a disguise for reasons of secrecy and espionage.

Willing Channeler - a Host who "wants" to be controlled, or at least isn't against having his/her body used by someone (or something) else.

An entirely alternate meaning refers to The Internet and New Media culture in social media: an online "entourage" or crowd of Yes People surrounding a particular Internet user and/or a "personal army" of Internet users recruited to attack or defend someone in a Flame War or flare of Internet Backdraft, or to promote them or their product. This is connected to AstroTurf except that AstroTurf is usually for a politician, product, company, or one side in a war or conflict, whereas a Meat Puppet can appear anywhere (and are often why a debate escalates to Flame War, Internet Backdraft, or appearing on Fandom Wank levels). These are usually called Meat Puppet as opposed to Sock Puppet, because they are actually separate people, unlike a Sock Puppet, which is a different user identity (or collection of them) created by the same person. That said, good luck in telling them apart, especially in places that allow anonymity and don't ban proxies.

Examples:

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Film - Animated

Pokémon: The First Movie. Mewtwo takes control of the local Nurse Joy's mind and uses her as the interface between it and the trainers invited to the island before it reveals itself.

The ancillaries from Ancillary Justice. They're typically made using dissidents from conquered worlds, and act as ground soldiers and tools controlled by a ship's AI. Most people call them corpse soldiers.

Two very creepy examples in The Caster Chronicles - Sarafine inhabiting Mrs. Lincoln in Beautiful Creatures, and Mrs. English being possessed by the Lilum in Beautiful Chaos.

George R.R. Martin had a short story in which the corpses of executed criminals were implanted with control chips and sold as industrial equipment. They were only good for certain types of work, because they were somewhat clumsy and required human operators. Much of the plot revolved around the practical and financial issues facing the corpse-driver protagonists.

Live-Action TV

In The Flash (2014), Doctor Alchemy was created by Savitar taking over Julian Albert's mind with the Philosopher's Stone.

Geist surrounds itself in having the player possess hosts both biological and machine to affect the living world and defeat the Big Bad. There's even a minigame devoted to Ghosts vs Hosts.

Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy refers to mind controlled soldiers (under the terrorist group: The Movement) as Meat Puppets, and is the trope namer in this case.

Pain Killer also contains a character who uses mind control to manipulate potential enemy hosts, (and sometimes including allies).

The Half-Life series features various types of headcrab creatures that overlap with Zombie Mooks. The headcrabs apparently latch onto the skull of the host, eat their way through it, and then control the new "corpse" while simultaneously mutating it to make it even nastier.

The Flood parasites of Halo insert their tendrils into the nervous systems of their host subjects. Afterwards, they control and mutate the host in the same way that headcrabs do.

Ghost Trick: Yomiel can possess and manipulate living creatures the way Sissel manipulates inanimate objects. Aside from his cat the hosts are either unknowing or unwilling, but he can also possess the Empty Shell of his own corpse.

Meat Puppet: Yes, there is a game whose title is the same as this trope, and the game mostly follows the description at the top. Lotos/Lotus Abstraction answered a personal ad that said about "nocturnal missions". She is being controlled by The Puppet Master/Martinet. She is required to make Asshole Victims out of six leaders of the most profitable corporations (also known as ambassadors), and do this in one night, or else the suit that was put on her against her will will self-destruct and kill her! This is what Martinet is trying to accomplish: The Puppet Master wants to use Lotos to reassemble the fractured genetic key to universal entropy and shut down the universe. That would make Lotos accomplice to the biggest murder of all time a prospect that displeases her greatly. She'd rather save the world instead. You can find out more here.

In Chapter Two of ''Antlers Colorado, Austin is possessed and used as a vessel by an evil entity that has been bound to a lake for centuries. There's a chapter from Lake-Austin's point of view where it's obvious that the lake has no idea what the limitations of a human body are, or just doesn't care.

Stand Still, Stay Silent gives us the unnerving possibility of this being the ultimate fate of victims of The Plague that resulted in the current After the End setting the characters find themselves in. Be they Beast (animal-based victims), Troll (human-based victims) or Giant (combo-platter critters). As if facing becoming a Body of Bodies and/or Meat MossBody Horror wasn't enough, you could be trapped and watching yourself attack others for decades.

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